Publishing has the technology. Now it needs the connections

Publishing has no shortage of technology and, over the past decade, publishers have adopted new tools to manage metadata, sales, inventory, production, ecommerce and virtually every other part of the book business. More recently, artificial intelligence has added another layer to that ecosystem, promising to automate tasks and make increasingly sophisticated use of the information publishers already hold.

But adding technology and connecting a business are two different things. A book can still travel through a surprisingly fragmented chain of systems before reaching a reader: metadata needs to move from publisher to retailer, orders travel in the opposite direction, inventory and prices change, and sales data eventually comes back. Somewhere along the way, information may still need to be exported, imported, checked, corrected or manually entered into another system.

Publishing, in other words, has become increasingly digital without necessarily becoming integrated. So perhaps the next step in the industry's digital transformation is not another tool, but making the tools we already have talk to each other.

That is the kind of inefficiency Eduardo Cunha has spent much of his 25 years in publishing trying to address. Today, as CEO of Brazilian publishing technology company Bookinfo, his approach is to identify individual gaps in the book supply chain and find ways to connect or automate them - from metadata and sales intelligence to orders.

One of those gaps was the exchange of B2B orders between bookstores, distributors and publishers. In Brazil, Cunha says, many orders are still sent by email or messaging platforms and then entered into another company's system, creating not only repetitive work but a delay in the information moving back to the retailer.

Bookinfo launched BookHub this year to address that gap, using APIs to allow the existing systems of different companies to communicate rather than requiring them to be replaced.

Five to six months after launch, Cunha says the hub had processed 50,000 orders representing millions of Brasilian reais in transactions. With the systems integrated, a retailer can receive confirmation within an hour of what a publisher is able to supply and know whether missing titles are out of stock, out of print or potentially available elsewhere in the distribution network.

"Recently, the manager of a large international publishing company operating in Brazil called me to say that the integration had saved them three to four days in their operation," Cunha says. "If I open practically any order today, the logs show that it leaves a bookstore or distributor and, less than an hour later, it has already been processed in the publisher's system."

What changes here is not simply the technology, but the speed at which information can travel through the supply chain. Faster information can affect fulfilment, inventory decisions and customer service, but there is also a less measurable benefit: what people can do with the time technology gives back to them. For Cunha, one of the biggest advantages is "allowing people to work less on manual tasks and more on analysis and decision-making."

There is another side to integration that has little to do with software. After developing an API-based structure capable of communicating with different systems, Cunha says the bigger challenge became convincing people to change established ways of working.

"The biggest challenge today is people," he says. "People tend to think, 'It has always been done this way. This is how I do it.'"

Cunha describes companies as a combination of people, processes and systems, but argues that "the process is king." Technology can remove a manual step or connect two systems, but the benefits only appear when organisations are prepared to rethink the processes built around them.

And that raises a broader question about what digital transformation actually requires. Not every publishing technology problem requires an entirely new system. Sometimes the answer is creating better connections between the technology and information already present in the business.

The question becomes particularly relevant as publishers turn their attention to Artificial Intelligence. AI is increasingly being introduced into metadata, marketing, sales analysis and editorial workflows, creating possibilities for automation that go considerably further than transferring information between systems.

Bookinfo itself is experimenting with AI, including metadata analysis and recommendations based on sales patterns. For Cunha, the next step is to combine that data with automation and AI to help “the right book find the right shelf” — using information about what sells in individual stores to support more targeted commercial decisions. But Cunha sees a risk in focusing on increasingly sophisticated technology without first addressing the infrastructure underneath it.

"We still have very old software in Brazil and a lot of control based on spreadsheets, while at the same time we're talking about artificial intelligence without mastering basic fundamentals such as process automation, the proper use of data and well-structured metadata," he says.

The underlying principle is not specific to any one market. AI can analyse information, identify patterns and increasingly act across workflows, but it cannot make fragmented infrastructure disappear. If the information it needs sits across disconnected systems, inconsistent metadata and manual handoffs, automation inherits those weaknesses.

Perhaps the progression is simpler than the current technology conversation sometimes makes it seem: first digitize the information, then connect the systems, and only then automate the process.

The next significant technological shift in publishing may therefore not look particularly revolutionary. It might be an order moving automatically from one system to another, metadata being updated once and reaching everyone who needs it, or information returning quickly enough for someone to make a better decision.

None of this attracts the attention that Generative AI does, but it creates the infrastructure on which more ambitious innovation depends. Publishing has already digitized much of its business; the next challenge is making those digital pieces work together.

BookInfo is the largest ecosystem of B2B solutions for the Brazilian publishing market, bringing together technology, metadata, data intelligence, and integration among publishers, distributors, bookstores, and marketplaces. The company offers a suite of tools that connects the entire book supply chain - including platforms for metadata, price monitoring, inventory control, and sales intelligence - thereby fostering efficiency, transparency, and sustainability in the sector.